Google gets green light in China

Google Inc. reached a fragile accord with Chinese officials that will allow it to keep running its Web-site in the country, closing the latest stage in the ongoing showdown between the search giant and the People’s Republic over censorship.

The Mountain View company said early Friday that Beijing renewed a license necessary to operate the Chinese site Google.cn, after the business made changes to appease government concerns.

“We look forward to continuing to provide Web search and local products to our users in China,” the company said in a statement.

Google revealed last week that officials had threatened to not renew its content provider license if it continued to redirect mainland Google users to an unfiltered site in Hong Kong. The company employed that strategy beginning in March as a means of getting around censorship rules it pledged to stop following at the outset of the year, after it uncovered sophisticated cyberattacks against it and other U.S. businesses that were traced to China.

But once officials indicated the license wouldn’t be renewed, the company proposed an alternative approach, providing a link to the Hong Kong site on its Chinese home page rather than automatically redirecting users there. The tactic appears to have done the trick.

Google’s China site now offers access to products that don’t require filtering, including music and translation. Meanwhile, a link to the Hong Kong site, Google.com.hk, allows Chinese users to click through to conduct searches on the site if they choose.

It’s doubtful, however, that they will have full access to uncensored results. Since Google began redirecting traffic, the government has reportedly been employing the so called Great Firewall of China to block mainland access to subjects deemed sensitive, such as the Dalai Lama and Tiananmen Square protests.

The compromise allows both sides to claim minor victories: Google can say it’s holding firm to its pledge to not censor search results, even though the government will fulfill that task on their behalf. For its part, China can say it stood down Google, forcing it to stop redirecting users to the unfiltered site, even as it granted the company leeway to point them there.